Volkswagen Gets It

Well, sort of. They are flashing a hybrid diesel around that gets 70mpg. I keep saying that if the hybrid concept has any merit, then diesel hybrids are the way to go. But here is the part I don't get: The Volkswagen diesel Rabbit got 70mpg when I was in high school. Thirty-eight years later, the best we can do is a car that gets about the same mileage at the cost of far greater expense and complexity?

In 1980, the only way to break a Rabbit, or any other Volkswagen product, was to drive it into a tree at high speed (or, in my case, the side of a Blazer, but that's a long story...). Is there anyone that believes that three or four years of constant exposure to corrosive chemicals like road salt won't reduce all those fancy electronics to mush? I speak from experience here. Three times in the same winter, my fancy electronic-everything Chevy 3500 was reduced to an inert pile of scrap due to the corrosion of an electrical connection. Not running poorly or some minor system failure. Rather, dead-dead; as in paying hundreds of dollars to have a three-year-old, $50,000 vehicle hauled to a garage on a flatbed.

So as long as you live someplace like, oh, I don't know, Prescott, Arizona, you won't have many problems. At least until your vehicle is two or three years old and the battery has to be replaced at the cost of a few thousand dollars. But you couldn't pay me to depend on a three-year-old hybrid in Michigan.